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As Recovery Moves Ahead, G.E. Tops Expectations

A gas turbine at General Electric's factory in Belfort, France. The strongest industrial growth for G.E. was in international markets.Credit
Fabrice Dimier/Bloomberg News

The re-engineering of General Electric — a strategic overhaul begun in the depths of the financial crisis — remains on track and shows steady progress.

That, analysts say, is the underlying theme of the company’s second-quarter results on Friday, with profits and sales slightly surpassing Wall Street’s expectations.

G.E. has been slimming down its huge finance arm, GE Capital, while increasingly relying on its bedrock industrial businesses for long-term growth. The finance business is mending, with operating profits more than doubling in the second quarter from the depressed level of a year ago.

Indeed, GE Capital accounted for much of the profit improvement in the quarter. But industrial orders for equipment and services grew 24 percent during the quarter, and G.E.’s backlog of industrial orders reached a record $189 billion.

“GE Capital continues to get healthier, and industrial demand is picking up,” said Steven Winoker, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “That is the progression the company needs for the strategy to work.”

The solid second-quarter results from G.E., the nation’s largest industrial company, whose products range from jet engines to medical imaging machines, provide evidence of a gradually improving outlook for many industrial companies. Both Honeywell and Caterpillar reported sharply higher sales and profits on Friday and raised their earnings forecasts for the year. United Technologies and Goodrich also delivered strong results in recent days as well.

The strongest industrial growth for G.E., as for other large manufacturers, came in international markets, where revenue rose 23 percent in the quarter. Sales outside the United States account for 59 percent of G.E.’s industrial business.

“At least for companies that make advanced equipment that is often exported, there is a bit of manufacturing renaissance under way in the United States,” said Richard Tortoriello, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s.

Still, investors did not reward the industrial companies on a skittish day in the markets. Honeywell and G.E. shares slipped, with G.E. off 12 cents, to close at $19.04. Caterpillar reported a 44 percent jump in earnings, but that was a few cents below Wall Street estimates, and its shares fell $6.45, to $105.15.

G.E.’s net income for the second quarter rose 21 percent, to $3.76 billion, up from $3.11 billion in the period a year earlier.

The company reported operating earnings per share — the measure of performance most closely watched by Wall Street analysts — of 34 cents a share, up 17 percent from 29 cents a share in the period a year earlier.

The average estimate of analysts, as compiled by Thomson Reuters, was 32 cents a share.

G.E. reported revenue of $35.63 billion, down 4 percent from the $36.93 billion it reported in the quarter a year earlier. The falloff was a byproduct of the company’s steps to narrow its focus, as it sold a majority stake in NBC Universal, the television network and movie studio, to Comcast. Excluding that from the year-to-year comparison, G.E.’s revenue would have increased 7 percent in this year’s second quarter.

GE Capital, which has aggressively shed bad debt since the financial crisis hit in the fall of 2008, reported a 1 percent decline in revenue, to $11.63 billion in the second quarter, while operating profits jumped to nearly $1.66 billion, up from $743 million in the period a year earlier.

Some problems remain, mainly in commercial real estate, where it lost $335 million. Still, that was an improvement from a loss of $524 million in the second quarter of last year.

“The turnaround is in place, and it is a smaller, more focused GE Capital today,” Keith Sherin, G.E.’s chief financial officer, said in an interview.

Despite the costly repair of its finance arm, G.E. has continued to invest aggressively to expand some of its industrial divisions.

In the last nine months, for example, the company has spent more than $7 billion on three acquisitions to bolster its oil and gas equipment business — Dresser, the John Wood Group and Wellstream Holdings. The companies make specialized equipment for oilfield and offshore production, widening G.E.’s range of offerings in that $10 billion-a-year unit.

In a conference call, Jeffrey R. Immelt, G.E.’s chief executive, suggested that there would be no more sizable acquisitions for a while. In integrating the new businesses, he said, “We have a lot on our plate already.”

Instead, he said, the company, which is based in Fairfield, Conn., will look to spend its extra cash on increasing the dividend and buying back shares.

G.E. has raised its dividend three times in the last year, to an annual level of 60 cents a share. But that is still less than half the $1.24 a share it had paid in early 2009, when the company had to sharply reduce its annual payout to shareholders to conserve cash. The move in 2009 was G.E.’s first dividend cut since the Depression.

Most of G.E.’s industrial businesses — aviation, transportation, health care, and oil and gas — showed solid improvement compared with last year. But profits were down 19 percent in its big energy business for power generation equipment — gas, steam and wind turbines. G.E. executives described that business as a cyclical laggard, with orders already accumulating, and sales and profits poised to improve later this year.

Over all, Mr. Immelt said, “We like our portfolio of businesses. We like the G.E. outlook.”

Correction: July 22, 2011

An earlier version of this article had an incorrect value for three General Electric acquisitions in its oil-and-gas equipment business. It was $7 billion, not $7 million.

A version of this article appears in print on July 23, 2011, on Page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: As Recovery Moves Ahead, G.E. Tops Expectations. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe